Kane
- Pronunciation
- [Kane]
- Gender
- Male
- Meaning
- Intelligent
- Origin
- Celtic
About the Name Kane
Kane has multiple proposed origins. The most credible Irish line connects Kane to the surname Ó Catháin, the patronymic surname meaning "descendant of Cathán" — Cathán being the Old Irish personal name from cath meaning "battle, warrior." A separate Welsh line connects Kane to cain meaning "beautiful" or "fair." A third Hawaiian line connects Kane to the Hawaiian word for "man" or to Kane the major Polynesian deity (the god of light and life).
Notable bearers include American wrestler Kane (Glenn Thomas Jacobs, born 1967, the iconic American WWE professional wrestler whose career through the late 1990s and 2000s made him one of the foundational figures of American sports entertainment); the fictional Kane of the Citizen Kane film (Charles Foster Kane, played by Orson Welles, 1941, widely considered one of the greatest films ever made); and contemporary English soccer star Harry Kane (using Kane as a surname).
Kane's American climb is recent: the name climbed from outside the US top 1000 in 2000 to the US top 300 boys' rank by 2014 and the top 300 since. The name has been driven partly by Irish-American naming, partly by Hawaiian-American naming, and partly by the broader American taste for short, distinctive boys' names. The name's appeal sits in three contemporary American naming preferences: the multi-cultural etymological flexibility (Irish/Welsh/Hawaiian), the compact one-syllable structure with the distinctive K-N consonant rhythm, and the modern visual presence. The name reads as both classical-multi-cultural and contemporary American. Common nicknames are scarce since the name is already short — the rare Kaney and Kanie each occasionally appear; the alternate spellings Kane, Cain (the biblical spelling, see separate entry), Kayne, and Kahne have their own SSA tracking. International forms include Caín (Spanish), Kāne (Hawaiian original), and the original Old Irish Ó Catháin.
Source: U.S. Social Security Administration name data, 1880–2024 (methodology). By Marvin Tang.
Quick Facts About Kane
US Popularity History (2000–2025)
Annual US births named Kane by gender, from US Social Security Administration records. Peak year: 2018 with 1,054 boys named Kane (boy rank #319 that year).
Where it stands today: in 2025, ranked #451 for boys (695 US births). That's 132 places below its 2018 peak.
Source: US Social Security Administration. Limitations: US birth-certificate data only; names appearing fewer than 5 times in a given year are suppressed for privacy; spelling variants are counted separately. For names that ranked outside the US top 100 before year 2000, only the years they reached the top 100 are shown — the chart may have gaps for less-popular historical names.
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Where in the US Is Kane Most Popular?
Average boy-name rank within each state across 2016–2025 SSA records. A lower number means the name appears closer to the top of that state's boys-name rankings — a per-capita measure that isn't biased toward large states. For Kane the strongest states are Delaware, Montana, Hawaii.
Strongest boys-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Delaware | #177 | 26 |
| 2 | Montana | #202 | 32 |
| 3 | Hawaii | #211 | 38 |
| 4 | South Dakota | #227 | 33 |
| 5 | North Dakota | #230 | 31 |
| 6 | New Hampshire | #230 | 16 |
| 7 | Maine | #242 | 16 |
| 8 | West Virginia | #250 | 81 |
| 9 | Iowa | #253 | 147 |
| 10 | Louisiana | #256 | 212 |
Weakest boys-name states
| # | State | Avg rank | Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Utah | #539 | 40 |
| 2 | New York | #516 | 294 |
| 3 | Alabama | #497 | 95 |
| 4 | Oregon | #471 | 69 |
| 5 | Tennessee | #465 | 144 |
| 6 | Massachusetts | #463 | 106 |
| 7 | Mississippi | #456 | 67 |
| 8 | Connecticut | #440 | 52 |
| 9 | Virginia | #430 | 168 |
| 10 | South Carolina | #430 | 108 |
Source: SSA state-level baby-name dataset 2016–2025. States with fewer than 3 years of data for Kane in this window are excluded. Births < 5 in a given state-year are suppressed by SSA for privacy.
Variant Forms
| Name | Meaning | Gender | Origin |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cain | Possessed | Male | Hebrew |
Looking for names like Kane?
A dedicated page with 60+ related names — spelling variants, rhymes, alliterations, same-origin matches, and shared meaning concepts — lives at its own URL so each kind of similarity gets a deeper treatment than fits here.
Compare Kane to Other Popular Names
Side-by-side popularity charts and crossover years for Kane against today's most popular boys-name peers (top 8 by US births in the last 10 years of SSA records).